Debian Etch moves ever closer, and Ian Murdock - the project's founder - has been interviewed about Debian's politics, its lack of strong leadership, and Ubuntu's ever-growing fame. He feels that Debian is too enveloped in process and politics, making it impossible for anybody to make big decisions, thereby hindering the pace of development. In addition, on his weblog Murdock has announced he is joining Sun.

When I say support, I don't simply mean providing an OS that will compile said software. I mean to actually provide an integrated sun.com software repository and a quality set of package management tools to keep the software up to date. For an example, see Red Hat's supported package listing.

When I think of the types of projects I've been on these past couple years, they have all required a number of open source packages. In each case (whether or not we used Solaris or Linux), a Red Hat solution would have been both easier and quicker to deploy due to its package repository (or channel, if you will). In terms of future maintenance, the Red Hat servers will take less time since security updates will be provided through the same channel as the base OS updates...unlike Solaris where I will have to track each package's security list and recompile and reinstall each myself.